by Jason Crawford · September 5, 2024 · 2 min read
Two brief reviews of things I’ve read, one for everyone and one for my Substack subscribers.
A review in six tweets:
James C. Scott says that “tragic episodes” of social engineering have four elements: the administrative ordering of society (“legibility”), “high-modernist” ideology, an authoritarian state, and a society that lacks the capacity to resist.
This is a bit like saying that the worst wildfires have four elements: an overgrowth of brush and trees, a prolonged dry season, a committed arsonist, and strong prevailing winds. One of these things is not like the others!
The book reads as a critique of “high modernism” and of “legibility” (and the former’s attempt to create the latter). And there is a grain of truth in this critique. But it should be a critique first and foremost of authoritarianism.
But Scott is an anarchist, not only politically but metaphysically. So he doesn’t just criticize authoritarianism. He criticizes the very attempt to find, or to create, order and system. All such attempts are misguided, all order is false, all “legibility” is fake.
He goes on at length about how farmers know their land and crops so much better than any Western outsider with their “science” ever could! He ignores cases like Borlaug’s Green Revolution, where importing the products of Western science revolutionized agricultural productivity.
So I disagree with the philosophical upshot of the book. That said, it was fascinating and contained many amazing facts and stories. Worth reading for the stuff about Le Corbusier alone. E.g., this quote from Le Corbusier is mind-bending in its detachment from reality:
Any architect, I imagine, supposes that the dwellings she designs will contribute to her clients’ happiness rather than to their misery. The difference lies in how the architect understands happiness. For Le Corbusier, “human happiness already exists expressed in terms of numbers, of mathematics, of properly calculated designs, plans in which the cities can already be seen.” He was certain, at least rhetorically, that since his city was the rational expression of a machine-age consciousness, modern man would embrace it wholeheartedly.
PS: To be clear, there are more lessons to take away from Seeing Like a State than just “authoritarianism is bad.” At its best, the book is a critique of technocracy.
See also this critique of the same book by Paul Seabright, and this defense of grain from the always-excellent Rachel Laudan.
Given that Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, was a terrorist who killed university professors and business executives with mail bombs and who lived like a hermit in a shack in the woods of Montana, I expected his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and its Future,” to read like the delirious ravings of a lunatic.
I was wrong. His prose is quite readable, and the manifesto has a clear inner logic. This is a virtue, because it’s plain to see where he is actually right, and where he goes disastrously wrong.
Read this review on my Substack.
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